“Following a firestorm of negative feedback, CNN hastily deleted from its website late Wednesday virtually all mention of a study about the effect hormones have on women’s political preferences.

“‘A post previously published in this space regarding a study about how hormones may influence voting choices has been removed,’ a message posted on the website at 8:15 p.m. read. ‘After further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN. We thank you for your comments and feedback.'”

mustn’t offend the sheeple’s sensibilities! sheesh. like goofy hormones and SEX never entered into any woman’s (or even any man’s) electoral choice. gimmeabreak!

“While the campaigns eagerly pursue female voters, there’s something that may raise the chances for both presidential candidates that’s totally out of their control: women’s ovulation cycles.

“You read that right. New research suggests that hormones may influence female voting choices differently, depending on whether a woman is single or in a committed relationship.

“Please continue reading with caution. Although the study will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science, several political scientists who read the study have expressed skepticism about its conclusions.

“A bit of background: Women are more likely to vote than men, other studies have found. Current data suggest married women favor Gov. Mitt Romney, in a 19% difference, over President Barack Obama, while Obama commands the votes of single women by a 33% margin, according to the study. And previous studies have shown that political and religious attitudes may be influenced by reproductive goals.

“In the new study’s first experiment, Kristina Durante of the University of Texas, San Antonio and colleagues conducted an internet survey of 275 women who were not taking hormonal contraception and had regular menstrual cycles. About 55% were in committed relationships, including marriage.

“They found that women at their most fertile times of the month were less likely to be religious if they were single, and more likely to be religious if they were in committed relationships.

“Now for the even more controversial part: 502 women, also with regular periods and not taking hormonal contraception, were surveyed on voting preferences and a variety of political issues.

“The researchers found that during the fertile time of the month, when levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney, by a margin of at least 20%, Durante said. This seems to be the driver behind the researchers’ overall observation that single women were inclined toward Obama and committed women leaned toward Romney.

“Here’s how Durante explains this: When women are ovulating, they ‘feel sexier,’ and therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality. Married women have the same hormones firing, but tend to take the opposite viewpoint on these issues, she says.

“‘I think they’re overcompensating for the increase of the hormones motivating them to have sex with other men,’ she said. It’s a way of convincing themselves that they’re not the type to give in to such sexual urges, she said….

“‘We still have the ovulatory hormones that have the same impact on female brains as across other species,’ she said. We want sex and we want it with the best mate we can get. ‘But there are some high costs that come with it,’ she said, particularly for women who are already in committed relationships.

“This isn’t the first time hormones have been looked at in connection to voting. Last year Israeli researchers published a study in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology examined the stress hormone cortisol in voters in Israel. Levels of this hormone were higher in people right before they were about to vote than in the same people when they were not voting.

“Durante’s study on women noted that liberal attitudes favor social equality and tend to be less associated with organized religion. Conservatism is more about traditional values and is linked to greater participation in organized religion.

“The most controversial part of the study is not only that hormonal cycles are linked to women’s preferences for candidates and voting behaviors, but also that single women who are ovulating are more likely to be socially liberal, and relationship-committed women are more likely to be socially conservative, said Paul Kellstedt, associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University.

“One of the major caveats this paper fails to address is that men also have biochemical changes, Kellstedt said….”

that’s a reasonable caveat, and i’d like to see that studied, too — AND written about by the msm!

“The intent behind a question can establish an immoral line of inquiry and instigate immoral research methods (see the Nazi doctors’ experiments). But a question itself is not evil. Scandalous, offensive and sometimes frightening questions are often at the root of important scientific inquiry. When supported by data significant enough to support them, these questions drive us toward the truth (see, e.g., ‘the Earth is round’)…. Kanazawa does not earn censure with the political incorrectness of his question…” [my emphasis.]

hear, hear! (*hbdchick applauds vigorously*)

but, britton is not really very convincing ’cause she continues … in the very same sentence:

“…but earns social and scientific irrelevance through the weakness of his research. This irrelevance earns Kanazawa a special place in hell in today’s link-driven media economy – one where no one will hear him scream.” [my emphases.]

wait. what?

how did all-of-a-sudden-like SOCIAL irrelevance enter into this discussion? and, in hell? that’s mighty emotional, now, isn’t it? i thought we were talking about SCIENCE. (yeah, i know, i know. humor me.) as in, you know, the scientific method? the search for TRUTH and FACTS and all that? i mean, wtf?

if you haven’t read the whole post you’re in for a treat!, you might be surprised at this apparent turn in her … reasoning? but, there were hints … LOTS of them … that this conclusion was coming. here’s some choice bits from earlier in the post (again, my emphases):

“As it turns out, Kanazawa is a REPEAT OFFENDER, with years of roundly criticized and heartily debunked PSEUDOSCIENCE-based SHOCK-JOCKERY under his belt. Despite this, he is STILL posting on the blog of a reputable mainstream publication, STILL teaching at a respected university and STILL serving on the editorial board of one of his discipline’s peer-reviewed research journals. Though, possibly not for long: this particular post’s RACIST [oh no! not that! the horror, the horror.] hypothesis offended many, unleashing SERIOUS RIGHTEOUS OUTRAGE across the internet: social media users raced to blog, tweet and even petition demanding that Psychology Today remove Kanazawa as a contributor to their Web site and magazine….

“I see a more central flaw with Kanazawa’s method beyond its CREEPINESS, reliance on unscientific conjecture or abuse of factor analysis….”

“I am DISTURBED by the fact that the Add Health study’s adult researchers even answered the question of how attractive they rated these youth. I am EVEN MORE DEEPLY DISTRUBED by the idea that we are to extrapolate a general theory of desirability from these adult interviewers’ subjective assessment of the children’s attractiveness….”

so much for a question, itself, not being evil. deeply disturbing, and especially waaaaaycist, questions apparently should NOT be asked. eveh. never mind evil ones. if they do get asked … get prepared for some SERIOUS RIGHTEOUS OUTRAGE.

but, khadijah britton, like many women (yes, including yours truly), is an emotional gal, so kanazawa’s conclusions offended her … deeply …

“I drafted this post after spending a couple of days sorting through my emotions on Kanazawa’s work. Seeing that the man clearly relishes his role as an agent provocateur, I knew I could not impact him or those who respond to his work from a place of emotion. He has made that much clear.

As I tweeted after reading Kanazawa’s post, ‘Imagine a little Black girl reading this filth. [Toni Morrison’s novel] The Bluest Eye is not history to her. It’s reality.’ I want to protect that little girl – and wish I could heal all the little girls that came before her and grew up into beautiful women like this one, made to feel ugly by a racist society. I stand in solidarity with Black women and hope you will heed this blog’s cry to stand stronger than ever in self-love.” [my emphases.]

preach it, khadijah!

*exasperated sigh*

look. it’s ok to respond emotionally to what happens in the world. emotions are a part of being human — prolly more so for most women than most men.

but you’ve GOT to leave your emotions at the door when evaluating science! even if you think it’s shoddy science. just SHOW that it’s shoddy (if it is) and leave it at that.

we’ve got to be open and honest here. (as honest as we possibly can.) otherwise, we’re never gonna understand the world (and, potentially, really help people).

there’ve been a lot — a LOT — of refutations of kanazawa’s post on the attractiveness of black women. i haven’t read them all — in fact i’ve read hardly any of them ’cause most of them just scream and yell WAAAAAAYCIST!! BURN HIM, BURN HIM!!

*facepalm*

some of them, however, appear to be more scientific refutations. bering in mind links to another psychology today blogger (scott barry kaufman) who (along with someone named jelte wicherts in the netherlands) has supposedly (according to bering in mind) “failed to replicate” kanazawa’s findings.

here’s the evidence that kaufman and wicherts present (in the blog post) to show that kanazawa’s analysis was incorrect:

looks like black women were rated nearly as attractive as white women, right? and they were. in wave iv.

here’s how they fudged the data.

the add health thingie (from whence all the data comes) involved four waves of surveys over the course of several years (a couple of decades?). kaufman and wicherts decided that the only wave that should be included in any analysis on the attractiveness of women is wave iv, because in that wave the females were of legal age and, therefore, women.

no, i’m not kidding. they really said that!

now, i would agree with them if the subjects in the previous waves had been pre-pubescent children. but the ages in the waves were:

wave i = mean age 15.9 years
wave ii = average age 16.5 years
wave iii = mean age 22.1 years
wave iv = mean age 28.9 years

now come on! ok, so in waves i-iii most or all of the subjects were not of legal age, but probably the vast majority (except maybe for some late bloomers in wave i) were “reproductively of age” — meaning they could make babies. which is what the whole discussion is about! attractiveness, after all, is about attracting a mate.

*cough, cough* cherry-picking *cough, cough*

kanazawa didn’t include wave iv in his analysis, which is the wave when the attractiveness of whites and blacks was rated the most similar. don’t know why he didn’t use the data from that wave. kaufman mentions that the data from that wave has been available “for over a month.” well, maybe kanazawa didn’t realize the newest data had been published when he ran his analysis. i really dunno, but it’s definitely possible.

in any case, waves i-iii show that black women were rated as less attractive, altho i think the numbers in wave iii are not statistically significant. in wave iv, as i’ve said above, the rating for whites and blacks were pretty similar:

i still wanna know who the interviewers|evaluators were. were they all white folks? all asians? all illegal mexican workers picked up outside home-depot? their characteristics might’ve influenced the results.

actually, now that i mention it, the fieldwork for waves iii and iv was contracted out to a different company than waves i and ii. wonder if that made any difference in the evaluations?

btw, some real word data from okcupid maybe lends more support to kanazawa’s findings:

“Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.”

of course, he didn’t really, but who cares about silly little ol’ details like that.

what happened was kanazawa got some “attractiveness” data from add health. the evaluations were made “three times by three different interviewers over seven years” (during waves i – iii). the data showed that, consistently, black females scored lower in attractiveness than white, asian, or native american women; this did not happen in the case of black males.

andrew over @evolvify makes a good point about how attractiveness was rated:

“At this point, we have no idea who the interviewers who rated the students were. The attractiveness ratings would have been altered by varying degrees of prior familiarity between the individuals… whether the interviewers were of a certain age… the same sex or opposite sex breakdown… ingroup/outgroup… interviewer race… et cetera. There are simply a lot of variables that bring the reliability of attractiveness data into question. Perhaps this information is available, but it wasn’t in Kanazawa’s article, and I couldn’t find it on the study’s website.”

fieldworkers seem to be part-time, contract workers, afaics. with the connection to the unversity of south north carolina and the university of chicago, i was guessing that the fieldworkers were likely college students — maybe grad students interested in the field — sociology or whatever the heck it is (i’m talking about the interviewers here — i realize that the add health people are in the medical field). and, who winds up in sociology? mostly white women, with perhaps a few asian women thrown in. so, i was thinking that a lot of the interviewers might’ve been young white college women — and they might not find black women to be very attractive.

however, on the norc website, there are some videos of field interviewers explaining why they love their job, etc., etc., and they’re all older folks, i.e. not college students. of course, i’m sure this group is a pc-selected group — they’ve got almost all the races included there. but, still, three out of the five are white folks. if that is at all representative, then, yeah — there could, again, very well be some bias introduced here.

it’s still interesting that black women were consistently evaluated as the least attractive, but who were the evaluators? if they had been all black men, perhaps the results would’ve been different.

what i think is even more interesting is that blacks — both men and women — consistently rated themselves as attractive or highly attractive, more than members of the other races. black and proud! good for them!:

i listened to this beeb program (via dennis – thnx, dennis!) — Thilo Sarrazin live in Berlin (2 days remaining in which to listen to it) — and i thought sarrazin sounded much more well informed on biology|genetics than any news articles about him had suggested. (most news stories i saw talked about how he said there was a “jewish gene.” i’m sure now, after listening to him speak on this program, that he doesn’t think that. he clearly understands alleles and frequencies of alleles in different populations, etc., etc.)

what was really irritating — besides the self-parody-like political correctness of the bbc host and the retardness of most of the callers — was the fact that the host was completely unable, or completely unwilling, to understand what sarrazin was saying about alleles. unfortunately, sarrazin never actually used the word allele during the discussion. that might’ve helped. even if the host|listeners had no idea what an allele was, it might’ve (might’ve) helped sarrazin to explain to them that different populations have different frequencies of different variations of genes.

the host “framed the discussion” by saying that he didn’t believe that some groups, like ashkenazi jews, had certain “genes for intelligence” while other groups, like turkish kurds, did not. the host was trying to claim — and i think he, unfortunately, succeeded in making it seem — that sarrazin believed that kurds were lacking certain “genes for intelligence” altogether.

that’s obviously not what sarrazin meant. he tried to illustrate his point by saying that we all, for example, have genes for height, but some of us are short while others are tall. in other words, some of us have the “alleles for short” while others have the “alleles for tall” (all else being equal, of course).

it didn’t sink in. probably because the beeb host didn’t want it to.

the beeb host, in his pc-ignorance, also dismissed differences in iq between different groups just by saying in an offhand manner that “those ideas went out of fashion 60 years ago” (or words to that effect).

*facepalm*

oh, to be pc-ignorant.

the other funny part was when sarrazin said he was a little frustrated when, during discussions of his book, he experienced many people arguing on the basis of their emotions rather than the facts, he being interested in the facts. then, a turkish-german woman called in to respond|discuss the point with him, and she was sooooo emotional! and sarrazin remained calm and just reiterated the facts. it was an amusing illustration of the bio-cultural differences between germans and turks, and pretty much made his point perfectly. (~_^)

from the world values survey, in answer to the question* “In your opinion, how important should the following be as requirements for somebody seeking citizenship of your country? – Having ancestors from my country” …

80.9% of mexicans feel it’s very or rather important that a person ought to have MEXICAN ancestors in order to become a citizen of mexico. americans at 39.4% come nowhere close to that (click on the charts to see BIGGER versions):

mexicans are in league with sub-saharan africans on this score, although people from mali win the prize for being the most “xenophobic”:

and indians are even LESS welcoming than the mexicans. 87.2% of indians think u should have INDIAN ancestors if u wanna become a citizen of india:

now, more power to ‘em i say! but, next time some la raza advocate is annoyed when americans say they don’t want amnesty for all the illegal mexicans in the country — or the next time bill gates starts sayin’ we need more indians in the country — well, they oughta be reminded of these facts.

the rest of the asians surveyed also have pretty healthy “xenophobic” attitudes. the taiwanese scored kinda low, but i’m guessing they were thinking of their relatives back on the mainland when they answered that question.

and some europeans also feel strongly about the issue. whassup with the poles?! tired of being run over from both east and west?:

only the germans, norwegians, andorrans (who?), swedish and swiss scored lower than americans. but the swiss have shown lately (in their last few referendums on minarets, etc.) that they’re maybe finally getting a little fed up. even the laid back swedes voted in an “extremist” right-wing party last time round. and 13% of germans want a führer back. whoops!